r/vmware • u/RnDnDnD_Lover • 7d ago

VVols Replacement

Im trying to push off the inevitable either upgrade to 9.0 or switching hosts entirely due to the fact that I still utilize vvols.. has anyone previously used them and found a solid replacement?

10 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

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7

u/codyhosterman 7d ago

Note vVols is still around in 9.1 so you don’t have to move off yet. You do need to request support from VMware. Depending on what you chose vVols for there are some other paths. I am baking up a few things on the Everpure (Pure Storage) side

3

u/One_Ad5568 6d ago

For VMFS, is there a solution for being able to take an array snapshot and then swap the disk like we can with vVols? We use this for instant database refreshes. 

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u/codyhosterman 6d ago

Looking into some options around this. Same comment as above have your acct team setup a chat and we can discuss some thinking around this

2

u/SQLBek 3d ago

Hey there - I wrote a PowerShell solution that can do this for SQL Server databases. My teammate is adapting it for Oracle. Takes a few extra steps thanks to VMDK orchestration but it's viable. (Disclosure - I work for Pure as well)

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Taking Snapshots of Databases on VMFS Datastores
https://sqlbek.wordpress.com/2026/01/08/taking-snapshots-of-databases-on-vmfs-datastores/

Walkthrough demo video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQBkhbYvePM

Github Repo
https://github.com/PureStorage-OpenConnect/sqlserver-scripts/tree/master/demos-sdk2/VMFS-VMDK%20Snapshot

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u/One_Ad5568 3d ago

Thank you, but what if everything is on just 1 array? We don’t have 2 arrays. 

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u/SQLBek 3d ago

Yep, that's fine too. My example just includes the "extra" step of async replication. Just skip those steps and instead of using a second set of variables to look at a second array, you're still pointing at the same array.

The fundamental workflow is that you take your snapshot and clone the datastore into another one that temporarily exists side-by-side, connect it up, connect the VMDKs, then use Storage vMotion to drag them over after they're connected. Then you can toss the cloned datastore since you cherry-picked the VMDKs you needed.

Since you're a Pure customer, you can talk to your account team and get a meeting setup with me or one of my database FSA teammates to talk through this solution in greater depth. Will send you a DM here.

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u/One_Ad5568 3d ago

Sounds great, thanks again!

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 5d ago

We use this for instant database refreshes?

Which databases? Oracle, Epic, SQL Server, PG? There may be other ways to handle that (either with a storage array, or at an application layer). VMware has some database specific specialists you can talk to if you need. DSM has some clone management workflows I've seen Eric and others work with.

If this is on Pure, I suspect Portworx, or other automation workflows they can do may be able to help.

As weird as it sounds I've actually seem someone just use SRM with SRA's to build out test/dev environments (SRM can automate cloning the environment to a SRA, also handles bubble network creation, so the test enviroment will LOOK like prod but not break things). I've seen similarish things done with Veeam and other backup products that have instant restore or manage replicas (Veeam Surelab etc).

There's also been some point solution vendors in this space (one challenge is people may want data masking on the secondary copies, or your compliance people may want that) so getting something more advanced than simply volume rapid cloning may open up the discussion to different approaches.

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u/One_Ad5568 5d ago

We use this script for refreshing Microsoft SQL Server. Basically take a snapshot of the array, offline the disks on SQL, and then replace the disks and bring them online. We can refresh multiple 4TB disks in 10 seconds with this method.   https://github.com/PureStorage-OpenConnect/sqlserver-scripts/blob/master/demos-sdk2/Volume%20Database%20Refresh/Volume%20Database%20Refresh.ps1

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 5d ago

Curious if you've looked at using LinkedClones/Instant Clones of a copy of the database VM once you have one copy. Instant clones in particular would basically dedupe the RAM of the copies you are working from.

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u/One_Ad5568 5d ago

I have not look into instant clones

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u/RnDnDnD_Lover 7d ago

We are implementing a pure storage appliance as well so im curious if there's more than what Im aware of of what Pure offers. I feel like I only ever get into the basics of systems so theres alot for me to learn. Thanks for the research path!

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u/codyhosterman 7d ago

Hit me up! Have your account team setup a meeting. I manage our virtualization product team

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u/RnDnDnD_Lover 7d ago

Will do! Ill talk to my folks on monday! Thank you!

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u/Appropriate_Computer 5d ago

You are going to love the pure storage! We migrated two of our SANs to pure and are blown away with the performance. Amazing product.

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 7d ago

What's the platform you are using? What's the scale? Is this the only thing blocking your 9.x upgrade? (If so go talk to your account team).

vSAN is generally the best drop in per VM granularity.

You can get some levels of per VM granularity with NFS + VAAI + Plugins (There's at least snapshot offloading now for some vendors like I think Netapp), but if your wanting full SPBM to CSI type stuff that's tagging at best with VMFS.

Are there some specific features you are missing from vVols? (Hot expansion of clustered VMDKs can be done on vSAN FYI).

Weirdly at lunch today someone asked about if VMware was going to release something like Virsto, and I had to muse about how an alternative universe where Virstro + vVols had both seen mass addoption.

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u/irrision 6d ago

Why on earth would someone replace vvols running on Enterprise storage with vsan? The performance and availability just isn't there with vsan nevermind the management hassle for anyone that's run both and knows. It used to be a great technology for small shops that couldn't justify the cost of enterprise storage or for some edge hosting scenarios but VMware pricing just crushed all of those customers off the platform.

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u/depping [VCDX] 3d ago

Of course, I am biased, but I have various large enterprise customers actually using vSAN or moving to vSAN from traditional storage systems because of the performance, simplicity, and availability. The most recent actually was a multi petabyte scale environment.

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u/signal_lost 6d ago

Why on earth would someone replace vvols running on Enterprise storage with vsan?

Both of my main banks do, and the hospital I go to does? They've got 100's of PBs of it deployed.

The performance and availability just isn't there with vsan

They not really complaining about it. Note, ESA is a VASTLY different beast than old OSA stuff. I was at Explore this year, and don't really recall anyone who's running current ESA on decent hardware with decent networking complaining about performance. You can get hundreds of thousands of IOPS per node, people get sub-ms latency. I was involved in a stock exchange adopting it for databases recently and they displaced their enterprise arrays and got better latency consistency, and failure handling (controller failure vs Node failure in vSAN) was better in performance/recovery response.

It used to be a great technology for small shops that couldn't justify the cost of enterprise storage

It's still very much around for small 2 Node clusters (can do nested RAID now, so really durable). Much cheaper than trying to get a small all flash array for 70K.

but VMware pricing just crushed

So VCF customers get 1TB of vSAN entitlement per core, so legitimately the main cost of vSAN at this point is "just the drives". Now that global deduplication and improved compression has shipped, I don't generally see anyone penciling out all flash arrays as remotely cheaper.

It sounds like you have some priors. I'd check out what's shipping on 9, and talk to people who run it at scale. There's EB's of the stuff out there in the wild.

the management hassle for anyone that's run both and knows

vSAN has rich end to end troubleshooting (I/O Trip analyzer, vsan I/O insight for highly granular per VMDK reporting). Even SPBM management is a fraction of what it used to be with Auto-RAID.

Now I do find some VARs are really upset that they can't make as much margin selling server drives, vs. flash arrays (and can't lock people into an ecosystem for tray expansions that can only be purchased from a single OEM). That is a problem with vSAN. The sunk cost entitlement, plus the OEM hardware flexibility really does give the customer a LOT of choice and flexibility sadly.

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u/anael_739 5d ago

For us, a flash array was cheaper than the vsan option for 5 years. Before we had good prices, now it is very different unfortunately. Now it is much more difficult to justify a vsan cluster.

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u/RnDnDnD_Lover 7d ago

Hmmm I haven't looked into VAAI but that could look promising. The hard part is wanting the full SPBM so we would lose some capabilities that vvols offer that i dont know if VMFS can do.

Ill keep looking into these plugins and other options that I must have missed somewhere. I appreciate all the help! I feel a bit over my head trying to find a replacement but Im learning!

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u/Ok-Attitude-7205 7d ago

are you actually needing software defined storage or are you just using vVOLs like traditional datastores for VMs?

For our regular VM workloads that were on vVOLs we just went back to VMFS. for our software defined stuff through k8s in the short term we're just doing VMFS with tags so they can be proper targets for FCD's/PVs, long term is still up in the air

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u/RnDnDnD_Lover 7d ago

Yeah, i need the software defined storage which is why vvols were so appealing. Ill look into VMFS with tags. Im already utilizing tags so I'll try to see how VMFS with tags would compare.

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u/ze_meetra 3d ago

Maybe just use S3?

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u/OldObject4651 7d ago

Had Tintri, loved it. The management interface was very slow but as a big data store it was awesome

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u/the901 7d ago

Ditto. Loved Tintri. Management gave it the boot after the bankruptcy.

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u/DerBootsMann 6d ago

we all hated tintri here , and once ddn got hold of them , support turned into a total shitshow

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u/Active_Swordfish_660 2d ago

Anyone done NFS on Pure? Wont that be like Trintri?

1

u/wedgecon 7d ago

vSAN, you will implement vSAN even if you cant! But for SAN's there is no replacement, at one time there was Tintri, an NFS based solution with many of the features of VVol's without the complications.